Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

I was young, and, despite dread, full of animal spirits; it was impossible for me to take a dark view too long.

It seemed especially cruel, then, three days later, in the hospital when the doctor came into the room to tell Leonard that he suffered from something that would never go away, something that could only be managed, as if managing, for an eighteen-year-old looking out on life, could be any life at all.

That was the ideal: to remain dutiful to a preservationist ethos while not depriving yourself of modern creature comforts.

Na kraju nije bilo bitno koliko su godina imale niti da su bile cure, nego samo da smo ih voljeli, a one nisu ?ule naš zov; ne ?uju nas ni danas, dok ih prorije?ene kose i salastih trbuha iz ku?ice na drvetu dozivamo da iza?u iz soba, kamo su otišle da zauvijek budu same - same u samoubojstvu, a samoubojstvo je dublje od smrti - i gdje mi nikad ne?emo na?i djeli?e da ih nanovo sklopimo.

Don't you think it would have been easier just to stay the way you were?" I lifted my face and looked into my mother's eyes. And I told her: "This is the way I was."   You

The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecelia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese).

There's a scabbard for every dagger,' the madam says in Turkish as the whores laugh.

Part of my interest was zoological. I's never seen a creature with so many freckles before. A Big Bang had occurred, originating at the bridge of her nose, and the force of this explosion had sent galaxies hurtling and drifting every end of her curved, warm-blooded universe. There were clusters of freckles on her forearms and wrists, an entire Milky Way spreading across her forehead, even a few sputtering quasars flung into the wormholes of her ears.

as she peered distrustfully over the rail of my crib, she saw my face—and blood intervened. Desdemona's worried expression hovered above my (similarly) perplexed one. Her mournful eyes gazed down at my (equally) large black orbs. Everything about us was the same. And so she picked me up and I did what grandchildren are supposed to do: I erased the years between us. I gave Desdemona back her original skin.

that he was destined for capitalism and not scholarship

Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began.

Tessio Zizmo had been a virgin when she married Milton Stephanides at the age of 22. Their engagement,which coincided with the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. My mother was proud of the way she'd managed to simultaneously kindle and snuff my father's flame,keeping him at a low burn for the duration of a global cataclysm.... She didn't surrender until after Japan had.

From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I'm dipping into principal, spending it all.

hearts wrung with anguish, the anguish of having children, a vulnerability as astonishing as the capacity for love that parenthood brings.

le monde est émotion à l'état pur, allant et venant entre ses créatures.

It is said: San Francisco is where young people go to retire.

La depresión no es algo de lo que uno se quita. No puedes desengancharte de la depresión. Depresión es como un moretón que nunca se te quita. Un moretón en la mente. Tienes que tener mucho cuidado de no tocarte donde duele. Pero está siempre ahí

It's then I smell smoke. You even smoke while you brush your teeth? She looks at me sideways. Menthol, she says.

From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn't do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me.

By cutting off my hair I was punishing myself for loving someone so much.

Next to it were five potted photographs of the Lisbon girls, pinned with rusty tacks. We didn't remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were phosphorescent outlines of the girls' bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup?

Elles nous avaient fait participer à leur folie, parce que nous ne pouvions faire autrement.

It was impossible to be friends with guys. Every guy she'd ever been friends with had ended up wanting something else, or had wanted something else from the beginning, and had been friends only under false pretenses.